"Tell certain liberals and progressives that
you can't bring yourself to vote for a candidate who opposes
gay rights, or who doesn't believe in Darwinian evolution,
and they'll nod along. Say that you'd never vote for a
politician caught using the 'n'-word, even if you agreed
with him on more policy issues than his opponent, and the
vast majority of left-leaning Americans would understand.
But these same people cannot conceive of how anyone can
discern Mitt Romney's flaws, which I've chronicled in the
course of the campaign, and still not vote for Obama. Don't
they see that Obama's transgressions are worse than any I've
mentioned? I don't see how anyone who confronts Obama's
record with clear eyes can enthusiastically support him. I
do understand how they might concluded that he is the lesser
of two evils, and back him reluctantly, but I'd have thought
more people on the left would regard a sustained assault on
civil liberties and the ongoing, needless killing of
innocent kids as deal-breakers."

Not long ago, I attended a speech by Obama, along
with thousands of his adoring cheerleaders formerly known as
citizens. I asked him to stop killing people in Afghanistan,
and the Secret Service asked me to leave. But, just now, I got
a phone call from the local Obama office. They had my name
because I'd picked up a ticket to attend the speech. The young
woman wanted to know if I would come help phone other people. I
asked if she was familiar with the president's kill list and his
policy of killing men, women, and children with drones. She
said she knew nothing about that but "respected my opinion."
She hung up. Objecting to presidential murder is now an
opinion, and willingness to be aware of its existence is an
appendage to the opinion. If you don't object to presidential
murder by Democrat, then you simply arrange not to know about
it. Thus, in your opinion, it doesn't exist.

Some of my friends at this moment are in Pakistan
apologizing to its government and its people for the endless
murderous drone war fought there by our country. They're
meeting with victims' families. They're speaking publicly in
opposition to the crimes of our government. And my neighbors,
living in some other universe, believe most fundamentally, not
that one candidate will save us, not that the two parties are
fundamentally opposed, not that a citizen's job is to vote, not
that war is all right if it's meant well -- although they
clearly believe all of those things -- but, most fundamentally,
they believe that unpleasant facts should simply be avoided.
So, in a spirit of afflicting the comfortable to comfort the
afflicted, here are a few from recent days:

WAR IS
A LIE

We know that in the past "defensive" wars have
been intentionally launched by fraud or provocation. We know
that many in our government want a war with Iran. We know that
several years ago then-Vice President Dick Cheney proposed
disguising U.S. ships as Iranian and attacking other U.S. ships
with them. We know that then-President George W. Bush proposed
disguising a plane as belonging to the United Nations, flying it
low, and trying to get Iraq to shoot at it. We know that there
was no Gulf of Tonkin incident, no evidence that Spain attacked
the Maine, no doubt that the weapons and troops on
board the Lusitania were public knowledge, no question
that FDR worked hard to provoke an attack by Japan, and so on.
And we know that Iran has not attacked another nation in
centuries. So, it almost goes without saying that Washington
warmongers are contemplating ways to get Iran to make the "first
move." Assassinating scientists hasn't worked, blowing up
buildings doesn't seem to do it, cyber-war isn't blossoming into
real war, sanctions are not sanctioning armed resistance, and
dubious accusations of Iranian terrorism aren't sticking.
Exactly what do we have to do to get ourselves innocently
attacked by the forces of evil?

The Israel Lobby to the rescue! Patrick Clawson,
Director of Research at the Washington Institute Of Near East
Policy, blurted out the following on video this week:

"Crisis initiation is really tough. And it's
very hard for me to see how the United States president can
get us to war with Iran. . . . The traditional way America
gets to war is what would be best for U.S. interests. Some
people might think that Mr. Roosevelt wanted to get us into
World War II . . . . You may recall, we had to wait for
Pearl Harbor. Some people might think Mr. Wilson wanted to
get us into World War I. You may recall that he had to wait
for the Lusitania episode. Some people might think
that Mr. Johnson wanted to send troops to Vietnam. You may
recall he had to wait for the Gulf of Tonkin episode. We
didn't go to war with Spain until the Maine
exploded. And Mr. Lincoln did not feel he could call out
the federal army until Fort Sumter was attacked, which is
why he ordered the commander at Fort Sumter to do exactly
that thing which the South Carolinians had said would cause
an attack. So, if in fact the Iranians aren't going to
compromise, it would be best if somebody else started the
war. . . . I mentioned that explosion on August 17th.
We could step up the pressure. I mean, look people, Iranian
submarines periodically go down. Someday one of them might
not come up. Who would know why? [LAUGHTER FROM AUDIENCE] .
. . . We are in the game of using covert means against the
Iranians. We could get nastier."

This is serious advocacy for manufacturing a
"defensive" and "humanitarian" war. This is not a war critic or
a Yes Men prankster. The position of most elected officials in
Washington, including the President, fits well with this. That
position includes the ultimatum that Iran must cease doing what
U.S. National Intelligence Estimates say it is not doing, namely
building nuclear weapons. The goal at the bottom of all of this
is war. The purpose of the war is not related to any of the
excuses for it. The purpose is something else entirely. But
it's ugly, so it's easier not to look.

HUMAN
EXPERIMENTATION

We often forget that war is the worst thing there
is. Hence our government's shift in policy back to outsourcing a
lot of the torture and insourcing the "cleaner" approach of
assassination without torture. Hence, also, our common fantasy
that war can be used to solve a problem that is somehow worse
than war.

We also forget that torturing people can be
crueler than experimenting on them. Torture has been given an
acceptance in the United States during the past decade that
"human experimentation" has not. So, we are still capable of a
bit of shock when
a story comes out like this one: During the 1950s and 1960s
the U.S. Army sprayed zinc cadmium sulfide, apparently including
radioactive particles, in poor neighborhoods in St. Louis and
other cities, to test the results on the people who unknowingly
breathed it.

At the end of World War II, the U.S. military's
Operation Paperclip brought nearly 500 Nazi scientists to the
United States to work on U.S. weaponry. Many view their
influence on the nascent military industrial complex as critical
to its sadistic and sociopathic tendencies ever since. In
fairness to the Nazis, it's possible that they simply fit in
well, serving the military of a nation with a long history of
genocide, slavery, torture, and public deception.

I came across a member of Veterans For Peace this
week who's been struggling many years as a result of
experimental vaccines and drugs given to hundreds of thousands
of U.S. soldiers during the Gulf War. We also learned this week
that every prisoner in the Guantanamo death camp
has been given experimental drugs without their knowledge or
at least without their consent.

"A congressional investigation has revealed a
top U.S. general in Afghanistan sought to stall an
investigation into abuse at a U.S.-funded hospital in Kabul
that kept patients in, quote, 'Auschwitz-like' conditions.
Army whistleblowers revealed photographs taken in 2010 which
show severely neglected, starving patients at Dawood
Hospital, considered the crown jewel of the Afghan medical
system, where the country's military personnel are treated.
The photos show severely emaciated patients, some suffering
from gangrene and maggot-infested wounds. For TV viewers of
Democracy Now!, please be warned: these images are
extremely graphic and may be disturbing."

NOTHING MORE EVIL

Here's what I'm trying to get at. If you try to
think of something more evil than what we are now doing, you'll
fail. Name your evil: destroying the earth's climate?
President Barack Obama flew to Copenhagen to single-handedly
derail any process for protecting the earth's atmosphere. The
only way in which to fantasize about greater evil is
quantitative, not qualitative. We could drop more bombs. We
could starve more children. We could experiment on more
prisoners. In fact, this is what Lesser Evilism amounts to. A
Lesser Evilist today is not choosing less evil policies, but the
same policies in what he or she hopes will be lesser amounts.

That might be a rational calculation within a
polling place. But living it prior to and after an election,
apologizing and cheering for one of two teams, as if
self-governance were a spectator sport, is nothing other than
complicity in the most hideous forms of cruelty and murder.
That complicity is insidious. Evil begins to look like
something else, because the Lesser Evilist, within his or her
own mind, comes to view the Lesser Evil forces as good, if not
glorious, if not saintly.

David
L. Swanson is an American activist, blogger and author. warisacrime.org

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